It’s likely to increase performance by running the CPU cooler when idle and better mapping thermal behavior to performace, so it’s an improvement for things like the steam deck or gaming as well.

I expect that should be fine, but there’s a URL signature scheme that is apparently involved, I’m worried that should I turn up a new instance, it won’t federate with e.g. mastodon.social

doingmypart.jpg I can have my own 502s as a treat

Your reverse proxy is doing websockets incorrectly, there’s some bogosity in the spec for websockets that makes them single hop and the proxy needs to propagate the upgrade request. Search for “nginx reverse proxy websocket”, e.g. https://www.nginx.com/blog/websocket-nginx/

The backend especially is not too demanding (thanks to using a compiled binary via Rust). The database demands probably scale, but postgres scaling is relatively well understood. I think right now the least scalable parts look like the frontend node and websocket stuff, but that can be improved. I’m not sure how I feel about Activity Pub protocol wise, it feels pretty chatty, so transit scalability might be something else to consider.